| Pentagon analyst plea bargains,
threatens to expose Israel's Washington cabal
Perspectives on Globalization
By Justin Raimondo
| 
The plea bargain struck by former Pentagon analyst Lawrence
A. Franklin – charged with five counts of handing
over classified information to officials of a pro-Israel
lobbying group, who passed it on to Israeli diplomatic
personnel – has delivered a body blow to the defense
of the two remaining accused spies. Steve Rosen, who
for 20 years was the chief lobbyist over at the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Keith Weissman,
AIPAC's top foreign policy analyst, befriended Franklin
and pumped him for top-secret information – including
sensitive data about al-Qaeda, the Khobar Towers terrorist
attack, Iran's weapons program, and attacks on U.S.
soldiers in Iraq. Now they face the likely prospect
of Franklin testifying to their treason in court. |
For months, AIPAC's defenders have been bruiting it about
that this prosecution is persecution, that the whole thing
is a "setup." What Rosen, Weissman, and Franklin
are accused of is routine, said their defenders – "everybody
does it" – and the decision to go after AIPAC is
thinly disguised anti-Semitism, the 21st century American
equivalent of Kristallnacht. They have impugned the FBI as
some sort of neo-Nazi outfit, exonerated the accused before
even hearing the charges, and engaged in a smear campaign
against anyone who wonders why it is that a purportedly American
organization is engaged in an intelligence-gathering operation
involving the transfer of top-secret information to a foreign
government.
Now the man they portrayed as being a persecuted victim is
admitting that, yes, he spied for Israel, and, furthermore,
the clear implication of this apparent plea bargain is that
he is prepared to expose the spy ring that Israel was –
and perhaps still is – running inside AIPAC, one of
the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington.
This case has received relatively little publicity in relation
to its importance. It isn't just the fact that, for the first
time in recent memory, Israel's powerful lobby has been humbled.
What is going on here is the exposure of Israel's underground
army in the U.S. – covert legions of propagandists and
outright spies, whose job it is to not only make the case
for Israel but to bend American policy to suit Israel's needs
(and, in the process, penetrate closely-held U.S. secrets).
Particularly fascinating is the apparent longevity of the
ongoing investigation: the implication of the latest indictment
[.pdf] is that FBI counterintelligence officials have been
looking into Israel's covert activities in the U.S. since
at least 1999, when Rosen apparently was observed telling
a "foreign official" that he (Rosen) had "picked
up an extremely sensitive piece of intelligence" identified
as "codeword protected." At this meeting, the indictment
avers, Rosen handed over this information – regarding
"terrorist activities in Central Asia" – to
the foreign official.
The AIPAC spy nest has been burrowing deeply into Washington's
official secrets without regard for propriety or party. The
indictment describes the duo's extensive contacts with a wide
range of U.S. government officials, Israeli diplomats, and
other individuals, none of them identified by name. However,
two have been subsequently outed in the media by sources close
to the investigation: they are David Satterfield, a deputy
assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs and now the second
most senior U.S. government representative in occupied Iraq,
and Kenneth Pollack, who served on the National Security Council
in the Clinton administration. Said Pollack: "I believe
I am USGO-1," identified in the second indictment as
having met with Rosen and Weissman on Dec. 12, 2000. Pollack
handed over classified information about "strategy options"
against an unidentified "Middle Eastern country."
Pollack, a key Democratic Party foreign policy adviser, authored
an influential book, The Threatening Storm, which convinced
many liberals to jump on board the pro-war bandwagon. "If
we observe how we were lied into war with Iraq, and by whom,"
I wrote in May, "the whole affair looks more like an
Israeli covert operation by the day." The AIPAC spy scandal
is confirming this in spades – and much else, too. It
is also showing that the Israelis were not about to stop with
Iraq, but were – and are – lobbying furiously
for more military action in the Middle East, this time aiming
for regime change in Tehran. The indictments issued against
Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman describe a systematic attempt
by Israel's fifth column in Washington to garner top-secret
U.S. intelligence about Iran, its weapons program, and U.S.
deliberations about what action to take.
The chief beneficiaries of the conquest of Iraq, and subsequent
threats against both Iran and Syria, have been, in descending
order, Israel, Iran, and Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda has used
the invasion as a recruiting tool and training ground for
its global jihad against the United States. Iran has extended
its influence deep into southern Iraq and has penetrated the
central government in Baghdad. In the long run, however, Israel
benefits the most, as a major Middle Eastern Arab country
fragments into at least three pieces and the U.S. military
is ineluctably drawn into neighboring countries.
While the U.S. imposes an occupation eerily reminiscent of
Israel's longstanding occupation of Palestinian lands and
prepares to deal with Israel's enemies in the region, Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon makes major incursions into the West
Bank, even while supposedly "withdrawing" from Gaza.
In the meantime, the political and military bonds between
the U.S. and Israel are strengthened, as the two allies present
an indissoluble united front against the entire Muslim world.
Except the alliance is far from indissoluble, as the AIPAC
spy scandal reveals. The U.S.-Israeli relationship, often
described as "special," is rather more ambiguous
than is generally recognized, both by Israel's staunchest
friends and its most implacable enemies. This has come out
in Israel's funneling American military technology to China,
and the threat of American sanctions, but was also made manifest
earlier by indications that Israel was conducting extensive
spying operations in the U.S. prior to 9/11 – suspicions
that are considerably strengthened by the AIPAC spy brouhaha.
Israel's secret war against America has so far been conducted
in the dark, but the Rosen-Weissman trial will expose these
night creatures to the light of day. Blinking and cursing,
they'll be confronted with their treason, and, even as they
whine that "everybody does it," the story of how
and why a cabal of foreign agents came to exert so much influence
on the shape of U.S. foreign policy will be told.
In the course of bending American policy to the Israelis'
will, they had to compromise the national security of the
United States – and that's what tripped them up, in
the end.
The blogger Billmon succinctly summed up how this case throws
a new light on the real contours of U.S.-Israeli relations
and puts an entirely different face on the "special relationship":
"While the marriage may look like perfect conjugal bliss
from the Washington end, the Jerusalem end has a different
point of view – and always will. The Israelis understand,
even if their American patrons do not, that they live in another
country, one with its own national interests, its own strategic
ambitions and its own enemies, none of which necessarily overlap
with America's.
"They don't even make much of an attempt to hide it,
as this writer for David Horowitz's Frontpage (to Israel what
the Daily Worker once was to the Soviet Union) makes clear:
'A more independent Israel is determined to make its own mark
on the world – questioning U.S. authority more frequently
in order to establish its own autonomous relations with other
countries.'
"A good idea. It's just a shame our own political lap
dogs and their media water carriers won't do likewise."
The Soviet analogy is very apt, The success of both the KGB
and the Mossad in Washington, albeit at different times, was
in both cases enabled by an alliance born of political necessity
as well as military utility. Our World War II alliance with
the Soviets made the KGB's job a lot easier, allowing them
to set up a network based on ideological loyalty that later
reaped intelligence dividends. In addition, there was a lot
of domestic political pressure to give the Russians what they
wanted, as the Communists took the lead in dragging us into
war in order to save Stalin's "workers' paradise"
from Hitler's legions. America's longstanding relationship
with Israel similarly gave the Israelis the basic structure
of a very efficient and increasingly bold spying apparatus
in the U.S., the tentacles of which reached into the upper
echelons of the U.S. government, including the Pentagon. AIPAC
functions simultaneously as a lobbying group – one whose
will is rarely defied by legislators – and as a key
link in the chain of espionage that binds us to the Israelis
in a very "special relationship."
Israel's legendary Mossad intelligence service, with its
reputation for both efficiency and ruthlessness, reportedly
shadowed the 9/11 hijackers on American soil as they prepared
to launch the biggest terrorist attack in our history. Multiple
sources reported a large-scale surveillance operation directed
at U.S. government buildings, including offices of the Drug
Enforcement Agency, the FBI, U.S. courthouses, and some military
bases and research facilities. The AIPAC spy cell in Washington
was the brain, and the "Israeli art students" –
whose movements shadowed the hijackers in Florida and elsewhere
– were the arms and feet of a subterranean creature
whose dimensions we are only just beginning to discover.
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray
N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author
of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative
Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center
for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire:
The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative,
a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct
Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently
for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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